2016-01-02 Tests done by Electric Power Research Institute show smeters fail many tests, and billing is “pretty accurate”

The New York Times reveals how, after taking 3 years to provide a precautionary statement re. use of cell phones, especially by children, within weeks of publishing it, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) backtracked due to pressure from outside agencies. Too bad that parents are not being told the truth about the possible harm.

“Just goes to show that any agency actually sticking its head up about cell phone (or smart meter, etc.) radiation will quickly be pounded down by vested interests – including, interestingly, the worry of local governments about being held legally responsible for allowing cell phones [and WiFi – are you listening, Perry Kendall?] in schools. In other words, “the problem is so huge that we don’t even want to think about it.” It’s up to us ordinary citizens to keep up the alarms.”

Huge amounts of personal data are being gathered by smeters – data that is not needed for billing purposes, and that is all BC Hydro and Fortis have right to. We are paying for the all the software and devices being used to invade our privacy. Why is this being allowed?

“I think the data is going to be worth a lot more than the commodity that’s being consumed to generate the data,” said Miles Keogh, director of grants and research at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

All sorts of inferences about people’s private lives are potentially available from detailed energy consumption data. The number of people inside a house. Daily routines. Degree of religious observance. Household appliance usage.

“Very sensitive information can be revealed about homes, and homes are the most sacred privacy environment,” said Nancy King, an Oregon State University business law and ethics academic who’s studying smart meter deployments. Access and control of that energy usage data will be key, she added. “Most consumers are just unaware about how their data feeds into the Big Data machine and are powerless to do much about it.”

A couple of years ago some Danish students showed how garden cress seeds will not germinate when exposed to EMR from wifi. Now scientists have shown that the seeds won’t germinate when within 200 meters of 2 cell transmitters. What is this radiation doing to us?

Meter companies are looking at the possibility of using ‘surplus’ smeter time to create a huge computer. We pay for the infrastructure, suffer the consequences of these irradiating fire hazards, and companies could make a mint out of using our homes to house computers for commercial use.

“On the second front, Hive is starting to test it out on communications cards from smart-meter vendor Itron. “They’ve already provided us with some of their hardware, so we can start porting our solution from the lab onto real meters,” said Orrantia.

Like most utilities, we’re very interested in things that look to expand or extend our investment, and make the business case look better,” said Smith….

But as Smith has pointed out in the past, the latent capacity of the world’s smart meter network approaches that of the world’s better-known supercomputers. For example, 3,000 smart meters have nearly the same amount of processing power and memory capability as Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that beat Garry Kasparov in a game of virtual chess in 1997, and 150,000 meters add up to about half the computing power of IBM’s Watson supercomputer, he said.

With millions of smart meters able to do work, “This would be like flooding the market with supercomputing capacity, if it’s real,” he said. “This would make the price of what Amazon and Google are doing plunge.”

Some of the comments are very interesting. This one, for example, by Dennis Heidner. We deserve to get assurances that these things are accurate in all of their measurements, especially before time of use billing is implemented. Revenue measuring “pretty accurate”? Our bills therefore will be “pretty accurate”. That is not good enough.

“Then let’s talk about the smart meters themselves. Two weeks ago the IEEE 2015 Power Engineering Society (PES) was held in Denver Colorado… I attended on session which I found particularly interesting.. it was on the possibility of using smart meters as small deployable phasor measurement units (PMU). EPRI did tests and found that while the revenue measuring was pretty accurate... the rest of the measurements in the below second range for voltage, current, time… well… let’s same most of the units failed any and all tests. Not accurate enough, not enough compute horse power… etc.”(EPRI stands for Electric Power Research Institute.)

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Letters:

From a member: There is no way Hydro could disconnect or charge people with late payment if they failed to send the bill on time. Has anyone else had their bills arrive late with no explanation? Please let me know, with “late bill” on the subject line.

I wanted to report the following: my last month’s Hydro bill arrived 2 1/2 weeks late. I phoned twice about this and one of the 2 telephone employees said: it was due to too many people phoning in their meter reading’, a silly reason in my opinion, which made so sense to me. During the second phone call I made, a few days later, still requesting info why my bill is so late, the person said he could not find out why the billing was late and there is no reason why the other person said what she did. He was more polite though.

I am now thinking this might be a new tactic by Hydro to keep the refusnik customers delayed with payment, more reason to send another disconnect threat, etc. I pay my power usage calculated to detail by me and then the following month I pay the extortion overdue amount. I have now paid them in total since inception of the S- meter program and my refusal, $735.00, for a senior below poverty line a huge amount. I did not do any Xmas presents at all, again. Hydro is unbelievably cruel, unjust and makes me plain angry.
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